The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians (review)

As Ronald Heine points out at the beginning of his book, "the loss of so much of Origen's exegetical work is one of the tragedies of ancient Church history" (vii). Jerome reports that Origen wrote commentaries on most of Paul's letters. Of these, only Rufinus' translation of the Commentary on Romans survives in a form close to that of Origen's original. The Commentary on Ephesians does not survive in a complete form, but significant fragments have been preserved. In addition, Jerome composed his own Commentary on Ephesians, and this commentary has survived. According to Heine, Jerome's commentary depends so heavily on Origen that is it possible to use Jerome, together with the extant fragments, to get a fairly good sense of the content of Origen's lost Commentary on Ephesians. This is the basic ambition of Heine's work. The author is careful to point out that he is not offering a reconstruction of Origen's commentary but a recovery such that "we can hear [Origen's] voice, admittedly sometimes muffled or cut short, speaking about the mysteries of this epistle" (2).

In order to facilitate this recovery, Heine presents the commentaries of Origen and Jerome in parallel columns. He also makes some scholarly judgments about Jerome's text and italicizes Jerome's words when he judges that Origen is a very proximate source. These judgments are made on the basis of passages in which 1) Jerome's words directly parallel catena sources preserving Origen's text, 2) the ideas are identified by Jerome himself as deriving from Origen, 3) Rufinus cites passages from Jerome to prove he depended upon Origen, or 4) the ideas reflect those which are present in other, more complete, works of Origen. The laborious application of these criteria to the two commentaries adds considerably to the usefulness of Heine's project. We not only gain access to two important patristic interpretations of Paul's epistle, but we also gain a deeper appreciation of the extent to which Jerome relied upon Origen in the composition of his own commentaries.

In Heine's volume the text of the commentaries is preceded by a substantial introduction (71 pages). His approach is traditional historical-critical analysis. He treats the histories of the commentaries separately, carefully locating them in the timeline of each author's other works. He also discusses the place of the commentaries in the exegetical tradition and explains any relevant textual issues. Here Heine also builds his case for the heavy dependence of Jerome on Origen and lays the foundation for the extensive recovery effort to follow.

Toward the end of the introduction the author reflects briefly on the actual content of the commentaries. Here, however, the effort is not so much to explore the Ephesians commentary itself but to situate the epistle generally in the thought of Origen. According to Heine, "Origen ranked Ephesians as the pinnacle of the Pauline epistles" (48). Passages like Ephesians 1.4 ("before the foundation of the world") and 2.7 ("the ages to come") were excellent fuel for some of Origen's most famous speculations about creation and its fate. By studying Origen's development of passages from Ephesians, we can get a better sense of what he might have said in this commentary, especially in those places where only Jerome's voice survives.

Despite the quality of the introduction, the most interesting feature of this book is, of course, the commentary itself. Like all commentaries, this one defies summary. The voices of Origen and Jerome interweave to create an interesting set of contrasts. It is always stimulating to read patristic commentaries on Paul that are free from the dominating vision of Augustine. Discussions of freedom and predestination pass by with barley a nod in the direction that so preoccupied later generations. Likewise, this reader was especially intrigued by the discussion of the...